Couple 'do the right thing' with valuable find at Vista Point in Marin

Forget the flowers and candlelit dinner. Forget the routine that comes after 30 years of marriage.

Barbara and Carlos Landeros forgot it all when a Valentine's Day trip to San Francisco left them watching over a black camera bag with more than $11,000 in cash tucked inside.

The bag had been left at Vista Point in Marin, amid heavy tourist traffic on a clear day.

The couple waited for someone to return for the bag before eventually sorting through it and finding an envelope filled with U.S. money, a wallet with Chinese currency but no photo identification, several credit cards and an expensive-looking camera.

"First I was thinking it was drug money," Barbara Landeros said from her Vallejo home last week. "I said, maybe somebody's supposed to pick it up."

Carlos Landeros, arm wrapped around his wife, chuckled in hindsight as she remembered worrying, "We were like open targets out there."

But they were a little giddy — posing for photographs sitting next to the bag and its contents, and holding a fanned-out stack of $100 bills.

Several days later, they learned the bag and its contents belonged to a Chinese tourist who had attended college in the Bay Area and was traveling to San Francisco with his family.

After waiting for about an hour and a half at the bridge, the couple dropped the bag off at police headquarters. Turning over the money to San Francisco police was a two-hour process that kept them running in and out of the station to ensure their car was not towed.

Carlos Landeros conceded that in the course of the afternoon-long tiring ordeal, there were times it did not always feel worth it to do the right thing, but to do otherwise "wouldn't feel good."

"In our (Hispanic) culture, we were raised to do the right thing," Barbara Landeros said. "You find something, you turn it in. That's how we were brought up."

San Francisco Police spokeswoman, Officer Albie Esparza, said police tracked down the bag's owner using airline ticket information inside the bag. The man, identified only as "Mark," told police that nothing was missing from the bag.

"It's not uncommon for people to return things, but when you come across a bag with $11,000 cash, that's quite unusual," Esparza said. "It's just really good to know that people nowadays still have the integrity to do the right thing."

Outsiders who have heard of the good deed have said they would have taken the money and run, Barbara Landeros said.